David Ivon Jones

DI Jones, born in the Welsh industrial town of Aberystwyth in 1883,
contracted TB at an early age and emigrated to New Zealand for health reasons.
There he hunted rabbits for a living. He moved to the Transvaal in 1909, working
as a clerk for the Victoria Falls Power Company. He lived in South Africa only
until 1920, but left an indelible imprint. A great theorist and publicist, he
joined the socialist movement and was elected general secretary of the Labour
Party in 1914. He denounced the government`s pro-war policy, was one of the
founders the War-on-War Movement, and in 1915 broke from the Labour Party to
form the International Socialist League, of which he became the first
Secretary-editor, responsible for producing the weekly newspaper, The
International.

With remarkable insight, Jones hailed the February phase of the Russian
Revolution of 1917 as `a bourgeois revolution, but arriving when the night of
capitalism is far spent`. Wasting away with TB, Jones left South African in
November 1920, never to return. While on his way to Moscow he wrote a long
report on South Africa for the Communist International, stating that although
Africans were no more than cheap sources of labour in the colonial system, they
soon became good trade unionists and loyal agitators for their class. National
interests could not be distinguished from class interests, and formed the basis
of `a revolutionary nationalist movement in the fullest meaning of Lenin`s
term`.

While in Moscow, DI Jones did a great deal of writing, and was one of the
first people to translate some of Lenin`s work`s into English. In his last
letter to Bill Andrews, written shortly before he died in Yalta on 13 April
1924, he argued that the struggle of South Africa took the form of a `colonial
national movement of liberation`. The appropriate standards to apply were set
out in the Theses on the National and Colonial Question. `We stand for
Bolshevism, and in all minds Bolshevism stands for the native worker`, he
proudly affirmed.